44. Derek
DEREK
The monitor beside the bed beeped in a rhythm slow enough that I'd started counting the gaps between them just to have something to do with my mind besides the ache running the length of my right forearm.
Leah slept in the chair she'd dragged in close, her head tipped at an angle that was going to leave her neck stiff for a week, one hand still resting near mine on the blanket like she'd fallen asleep holding on and hadn't let go even unconscious.
I watched her for a long minute before I did anything about it.
My throat still felt like I'd swallowed gravel, raw and scraped from the inside out.
But it was nothing next to watching her sleep sitting up in a plastic hospital chair, because she hadn't wanted to leave my side long enough to find a bed of her own.
Somewhere down the hall a cart rattled past, wheels squeaking against linoleum, and a low murmur of voices drifted through the door someone had left cracked open.
The window beside the bed showed a gray, colorless morning, the kind of light that made everything in the room look a little more worn than it probably was, including me.
I flexed my bandaged hand once, testing how much the burn objected to movement, and decided the answer was considerably.
"Leah."
She woke the way she did most things, all at once and fully committed, her eyes snapping open and finding mine before the rest of her had caught up.
"You're awake." She said it like she was confirming it to herself as much as to me, her hand tightening around mine.
"Mostly." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "You didn't have to sleep in a chair."
"I didn't sleep. I closed my eyes for strategic reasons."
"For an hour."
"An hour isn't sleep. It's a tactical pause." She sat up straighter, wincing at whatever her spine had decided to do to her overnight, and reached for the water cup on the tray table, holding the straw to my mouth before I'd even asked for it. "How's the arm?"
"Loud. In a way that seems unfair given how quiet everything else in here is."
"The doctor said the burn's healing clean. No graft needed." She said it carefully, like she was testing whether I already knew, and something in her face told me she'd been carrying that particular fact around like a small, private relief for hours.
"I remember some of it." I hadn't meant to say it yet, hadn't planned this conversation at all, but it came anyway, the way true things sometimes did once you stopped standing in front of the door keeping them shut.
"The smoke. Finding her. I thought I wasn't going to make it back out with both of us, and then somehow we did, and I don't actually remember the part in between. "
Leah went very still, watching me with an attention I recognized, the kind she gave things that mattered too much to interrupt.
"I went in because I couldn't live with not going in.
That part I'm sure of." I looked at the ceiling instead of her, because some things were easier to say without a face attached to them.
"Boston, I stayed back. Followed the order I gave myself, held exactly where command was supposed to hold, and Mike didn't come out.
I told myself for two years that staying back was the responsible choice, the correct choice, and it was, on paper.
It just also meant I got to keep breathing while he didn't, and I never found a way to make peace with that math. "
"Derek."
"I'm not finished." I needed to say the rest of it now, while it was still moving instead of settling back down into the place I usually kept it.
"This time I didn't stay back. I went in, and it terrified me the entire way, and I'd do it again tomorrow if it meant Doris walked out breathing.
I think that's the difference. Not that I stopped being scared.
That I stopped letting the fear make the decision for me. "
She reached up and pressed her palm flat against my cheek, careful of the oxygen line still taped near my jaw, and didn't say anything for a moment, just let her thumb move slow against my skin like she was memorizing the shape of my face all over again.
"That's the healthiest thing I've ever heard you say about that night."
"Sarge would agree with you. He's already threatened to drive me to a counselor's office himself if I don't call one voluntarily."
"Sarge is a menace."
"Sarge is right, which is worse."
She laughed, quiet and warm, and the sound of it did more for the ache in my chest than anything the nurses had put in my IV line so far.
An hour later, with Leah stepping out to find real coffee and Sarge parked in the doorway pretending not to listen, I made the call myself, before anyone had to push harder than they already had.
"This is Derek Walsh," I said, once the counselor picked up, my voice still rough enough that I had to clear it twice to get the sentence out clean. "Sarge gave me your number. Said you specialize in first responders."
"He mentioned he might be sending someone my way. Tell me what happened."
I told her. All of it, the tent fire and the smoke and Doris's name torn out of a stranger's throat.
Underneath all of that, because it turned out to be impossible to talk about one fire without the other one following it into the room, I told her about Boston too, about a stairwell and an order and a name that never finished.
"I went back in," I said, quiet, watching Sarge's shape shift in the doorway like he was trying to look busy and failing at it completely. "I'd do it again. I just don't want to lose everything else because of it."
"What would losing everything else look like, to you?"
"My crew stops trusting my judgment. Leah decides loving someone who runs toward fire costs more than she wants to keep paying.
I turn back into a man who can't sit in a quiet room without flinching at doors.
" I hadn't planned to say any of that out loud either, but the counselor had a voice built for exactly this kind of unplanned honesty, patient and unhurried in a way that made silence feel safe instead of dangerous.
"I'd rather deal with this now, out loud, with somebody whose job it is to help me deal with it, than carry it around for another two years pretending I already had. "
"That's a good start. Better than most people manage on their first call."
We talked for another twenty minutes, scheduling a real appointment for once I was out of this bed and back on my feet, and when I hung up I felt lighter in a way I hadn't expected, like I'd set down something heavy I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped noticing the weight of it.
Leah came back in with two coffees and found me sitting up straighter than I had all morning.
"You look different."
"I feel different." I took the coffee from her, grateful for something ordinary to hold onto. "I called the counselor. Made an appointment. Told her everything, Boston included."
"Derek, that's..." She trailed off, something bright and unguarded moving across her whole face. "That's really good."
"It is." I set the coffee down, because what I wanted to say next needed both my hands free and every ounce of nerve I had left after a night like the one we'd both just survived. "There's something else I need to say, and I need to actually finish it this time."
"Okay."
"I love you." The words came out steadier than I expected, no radio interrupting, no fist against a door frame, nothing left standing between me and finally saying the whole sentence. "I should've said it three separate times already, so... I love you. That one's not getting interrupted."
Leah's eyes filled, fast and unashamed, and she laughed even while she was doing it, the same way she had in the parking lot the second she'd heard me ask about Doris instead of myself.
"I love you too. I've loved you since a folding chair fight I still can't believe you found romantic."
"I found the dog romantic. You were collateral."
"Terrible. Absolutely terrible timing, and I love you anyway."
"For the record, I had a whole plan. Somewhere nicer than a hospital bed. Candles, maybe. A view that wasn't a parking structure."
"I'll take the parking structure. I'll take you in a hospital gown reciting insurance policy numbers if that's what it took to get here." She wiped her eyes with the back of one wrist, still laughing. "You really thought a folding chair fight was romantic?"
"You were furious and covered in dog slobber and completely unbothered by any of it. I'd never seen anything like you."
"That's either the nicest or the strangest thing anyone's ever said to me."
"With me it's usually both at once. You'll get used to it."
For one clean, unclenched second, lying there with a burned arm and a raw throat, I had everything I wanted sitting in a plastic chair three feet away.
I let myself feel it fully, without flinching away from how much it mattered, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, nothing in me was bracing for the other shoe.
Then Sarge knocked once on the open door frame, and one look at his face told me the other shoe had found me anyway.
"Derek." He stood there with his hat in both hands, turning it slowly, a man who clearly hated every word he was about to say. "It's bad. Even with the numbers."
"What numbers?"
"Festival revenue. Final count came in this morning, and it's the best this town's posted in a decade, fully documented, every dollar accounted for exactly the way you and Leah built it to be counted.
" He looked at the floor, then back up at me, like the next part cost him something to say out loud.
"Doesn't matter. County board's spooked by the liability from the fire.
They're talking consolidation. Rolling us into the regional station forty minutes out. "
"Digby warned me this was coming. Weeks ago, before the festival even opened. I told myself the numbers would be enough to change their minds if it ever actually came to a vote." I heard how hollow that sounded the second it left my mouth. "Guess I was wrong about that."
"You weren't wrong. You just didn't plan for a propane tent catching fire in front of four hundred witnesses and a county board looking for any excuse to close the book on us." Sarge finally stepped fully into the room, hat still turning slow in his hands. "Nobody could have planned for that."
"When's the vote?"
"Two weeks. Maybe less if they decide to rush it." He looked at me like he wanted to say something that might actually help and couldn't find it. "I'm sorry. I know today was supposed to be a good day."
"It was a good day. Right up until it wasn't."
The room went quiet except for the monitor still counting its slow, steady rhythm beside me, and I felt the tightness in my chest, finally loosened for the last hour, start winding itself right back up again, tight and familiar, the same old instinct rising up before I could stop it.
The old instinct again: protect what mattered by putting distance between it and anything that might cost me it.
Push before I could be the reason something broke.
I looked at Leah, at the coffee cooling in her hands and the love still hanging warm in the air between us, words I'd only just found the nerve to say out loud, and felt the ground shift under all of it exactly the way it always had.